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BUILDING A FINE marble palace does not guarantee you immortality in New York. There is always another architect waiting to design a newer, larger building on your site. Even if your palace is designated a landmark, that won't protect it from a "build-over," another structure placed on top of yours, if six members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission find that new tower to be "appropriate."
Park Tower Realty, headed by developer George Klein, proposes a 37-story addition to McKim, Mead & White's palatial landmark the Metropolitan Club. Designed by Stanford White, the club has been standing undisturbed at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 60th Street since 1894. This is the same George Klein who was chosen by the state's Urban Development Corporation to build subsidized office towers on Times Square. His Metropolitan Club tower project is being shepherded through the approval process by attorney Gordon Davis of Lord, Day & Lord. (Davis, a former city parks commissioner, is known as a member of Mayor Edward Koch's "kitchen cabinet.")
The designers, James Stewart Polshek Partners, don't call the tower a build-over but "a landmark intervention" (in language borrowed from the medical profession) in their glossy book about the project. Others compare...